DAA News Network

President Barack Obama issued an official proclamation to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the ADA. He also called for the ratification of the CRPD.
"Through the ADA, America was the first country in the world to comprehensively declare equality ...

On 22nd of July arguments were heard at a public hearing on proposed regulations that would phase out the use of controversial shock treatment for young people at the Judge Rosenberg Centre in Canton, Massachusetts. Representatives from civil and ...

Advocacy groups in North Carolina have filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the state Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) over deep cuts in Medicaid benefits to people with learning difficulties
The lawsuit claims that the new ...

Since 1997, about 200 of the 300 people living at the Minnesota Extended Treatment Options (METO), a residential institution for people with learning difficulties in Cambridge, were restrained by staff, sometimes for nothing more than touching a pizz ...

On June 15th, a federal judge approved a settlement to a long-running civil case that will force the state of Illinois to begin moving hundreds of people with learning difficulties into more community-based homes and apartments of their choice.
T ...

District Court Judge Leon Holmes has dismissed most of the claims made by the U.S. Department of Justice that the 500 disabled residents of the Conway Human Development Center (CHDC) in Arkansas were subjected to abuse and neglect, poor medical care, ...

In March, 2011, the New York Times published a devastating exposé of conditions in the state's residential institutions for disabled people. Now they have written a related story about the 2007 death of 13-year-old disabled boy, Jonathan Cary. He ...

In North Carolina advocates have filed a federal class-action lawsuit seeking to block the state from cutting in-home care services to 4,000 disabled people who need extensive assistance to remain at home and out of an institution.
"People with d ...

The state of Illinois is planning deep cuts to independent living support for disabled people. This is being done to help balance the state's $13 billion deficit.
The governor's proposal, one of three possible budgets being considered (from the g ...

Orlando Baez, a care worker, admitted to the sexual abuse of a 26-year-old woman with mental health problems living at Hillandale, a residential facility in Pasco County, Florida. This marks the second time an employee has been arrested for sexually ...

Matthew Israel (78), founder and director of the Judge Rotenberg Center, where disabled youngsters are punished with electric shocks, has been forced to quit the centre and to serve five years' probation.
These moves were the result of a plea bar ...

Kevin Castro, an 8-year-old disabled youngster from Floresville, Texas, has been denied his First Communion because he has cerebral palsy. Instead, Kevin was offered the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, also known as The Last Rig ...

Dr. George Denkowski, a psychologist who examined 14 inmates who are now on Texas' Death Row, and two others who were subsequently executed, and found them intellectually competent enough to face the death penalty, agreed on Thursday never to perform ...

Maryanne Godboldo said she should have the right to decide treatment for her disabled daughter, Ariana, whom she was weaning off antipsychotic drugs because of the negative side effects they were having on the child.
...

In an interim court ruling, Abbie Dorn, a disabled woman who can only communicate by blinking, has been granted visiting rights with her 4-year old triplets.
Two years after they were born, their parents divorced. Except for a four-day visit in D ...

Martin Harty, a 91-year-old Republican representative in the New Hampshire legislature, told, Sharon Omand, a constituent, that he believes in eugenics and that the world would be better off without "...the mentally ill, the retarded, people with phy ...

Laurie Peavy, a teacher at Woodstock High School in Cherokee County, Georgia, who duct-taped an autistic boy to a chair and confined a blind girl under a desk, pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and cruelty to children, was sentenced to six year ...

Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government is to spend $4.3 billion to help establish and expand community-based alternatives to long-term institutional care.
$621 million will be provided over the next five years to expand the Money F ...

A Justice Department investigation has found that Virginia is violating the rights of disabled residents by failing to provide sufficient community living options for those who are currently in institutions.
It was also found that the state is no ...

A federal judge has ruled that Los Angeles is discriminating against disabled people by failing to include them in its emergency preparedness plans.
The judge wrote that, "Because of the city's failure to address their unique needs, individuals w ...

In a lawsuit against the state of Arkansas, the US Justice Department claims that residents of the Conway Human Development Center aren't being given enough of a chance to move out into the community.
The state-run institution holds around 510 pe ...

A civil action has been started by the mother of a Navajo man with learning difficulties who was allegedly abused by three employees of one of McDonald's restaurants in New Mexico. It is claimed that the restaurant in Farmington hired employees in ...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports that charges of disability discrimination rose by about 17 percent last year to 25,165 claims.
The spike in disability claims began in the months after Congress approved changes to the Am ...

A Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report of the latest figures for crime (2008), show disabled people were twice as likely to be the victims of crime than their non-disabled peers.
The violent crimes included 40,000 rapes or sexual assa ...

More than 25 years of the work of ADAPT, the militant arm of the disability rights movement in the US, is chronicled in a photo exhibition the opens this week at Chicago's Center for Independent Living.
...

A family in Battle Ground, Indiana, have been told that because the state won't pay for their disabled son to live independently, they should consider leaving him at a shelter for homeless people.
The state bureau responsible denied this i ...

Johnnie Tuitel, 47, who has flown over 500,000 miles to give motivational speeches, said he was humiliated when he was kicked off a US Airways flight after being told he was too disabled to fly alone.
After helping him into his seat aboard ...

Mark Lyttle, a U.S. citizen of Puerto Rican descent with severe mental health problems was illegally deported to Mexico by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He spent over four months living on the streets and in the shelters and prisons of M ...

Ari Ne'eman is the first person recognised with autism to be appointed to a Presidential advisory body, in this case the National Council on Disability. As we have reported previously, his appointment was initially blocked in the Senate. The suspi ...

Nine years ago a federal judge ordered California to protect inmates with learning difficulties in state prisons. Last July, the state asked that the decree be lifted. However, the judge refused saying that these prisoners are still being, ‘verball ...

A study carried out by the University of Kansas has found two major federal government programs designed to help disabled people find jobs are not working.
"The biggest problem is that these are one-size-fits-all programs," said one of the ...

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) has fined AirTran Airways $500,000 for violations of the legal requirement to offer boarding assistance to disabled people. In addition, the airline frequently did not provide an adequate written response t ...

The UN Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a review of the human rights records of all 192 UN Member States carried out once every four years. It provides an opportunity for all States to report on what actions they have take ...

Twenty-two disabled people were arrested when they stopped traffic during a large, colourful demonstration outside California's Capitol Building on August 18th. 200 to 300 people had come to protest against the savage cuts to programmes supporting ...

"Not dependence but independence: That's what the ADA was all about," President Barack Obama said at a White House reception to mark the 20th anniversary of the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act).
Obama also signed an executive order th ...

July 26th marks the 20th anniversary of the signing of the ADA. A major report, the sixth in a series carried out since 1986, has found that, "While there has been modest improvement among a few indicators... there has yet to be significant progress ...

The director of a residential school for Deaf children in North Carolina has been suspended after allegations that she failed to act on reports that staff members slapped a student, shoved another and held one girl face-down on the floor with a force ...

Over 100 people gathered in front of City Hall in Havana, Illinois to demand action to protect Cory Miller, a 16-year-old wheelchair user, and to find and prosecute the youths who viciously attacked him on Saturday afternoon on Main Street.
...

A DNR (Do Not Resusciate) order was issued on Jack Frost's 8 year old disabled child, without his input or permission. He has been fighting for months both to have the DNR revoked and raise awareness of the issue more generally.
Frost maintains t ...

In our May issue of Our Rights, we reported that Ari Ne'eman, founder of the he Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, had his nomination to sit on National Council on Disability held up in the US Senate. It had been suggested this happened because some par ...

Michele Haddad had been told that community services would only be available if she was willing to enter a nursing home for 60 days. However, on June 23rd, a U.S. District Court in Jacksonville, Florida, citing the Americans with Disabilities Act's ( ...

Afederal appeals court has ruled that New York State must comply with a lower court's order to begin immediately transferring thousands of people with mental health problems in New York City out of large, institutional group homes and into their o ...

Disability Rights California (DRC) was in the Circuit Court of Appeals on June 15th to argue why the state should not make cuts to independent living support. Outside the court dozens of disabled and elderly people demonstrated in support of DRC. ...

Disability programmes in California are being slashed to cope with the state's massive financial deficit. Benefit payments were reduced last year and dental coverage was eliminated. The governor's current budget plan would eliminate in-home suppor ...

About 12.8 people in the US receive Social Security disability benefits.* At the moment, nearly 2 million people are waiting to find out if they qualify. The system is so overwhelmed by applications that many people are waiting more than two years fo ...

Judy Heumann, a well-known international disability rights advocate, has been appointed Special Advisor for International Disability Rights at the U.S. Department of State.
Between 2002 - 2006, Judy was the Advisor on Disability and Develo ...

Two Connecticut doctors, Gary Blick and Ron Levine, supported by Compassion and Choices, an euthanasia pressure group, are suing the State of Connecticut in order to legalise physician-assisted suicide. Opposition has come from Not Dead Yet, indiv ...

Rand Paul, the newly nominated Republican Senatorial candidate for Kentucky, has voiced opposition to both the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Paul, who claims to have a mandate from the ultra-rightwing Tea Party, m ...

Johnny Andron, a ten-year-old disabled boy, died of starvation while in foster case in Michigan. His mother, Elena, a single parent, had asked for help when she lost her job. The ‘help’ was to take her son into care.
...

The US Department of Justice is taking legal action against the state of Arkansas for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The lawsuit claims that, ‘The state gives individuals with developmental disabilities the draconian choice ...

After a 911 call from a 6-year old boy, police arrived at a house in the village of Park Forest, just south of Chicago, to find the boy's cousin, an 8-year-old disabled girl, chained to a bed. She was wearing a nylon dog harness and lying in her w ...

Ari Ne'eman is a neurodiverse university student in his early 20s, nominated by President Obama to serve on the National Council on Disability. He is the only one of the eight new nominees who is disabled and also the only one not to be confirmed ...

Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI) has claimed that in the name of ‘treatment' disabled children and young adults are in effect being tortured at the Judge Rotenberg Centre (JRC) in Canton, Massachusetts. According to their report, JR ...

By 2011 all of New York City's 1500 schools will be expected to enrol all but the most severely disabled students. This is being done to bring the city in line with national trend of mainstreaming and also because of the spiralling cost of ‘spec ...

The chief executive of the American Association of People with Disabilities, said that of all the budget cuts hitting services for disabled people throughout the US, South Carolina is the most extreme example.
To help deal with a $560 mill ...

Bob Marshall, a Republican state delegate in Virginia, has said, "The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its ve ...

Laura Cummings, a 23-year old with learning difficulties from North Collins, New York, was tortured and then murdered, allegedly by her mother and half brother. They will now stand trial after being indicted by a grand jury.
It has been cl ...

On February 11th, Jennifer Daugherty (30), who had learning difficulties, was found dead in a plastic garbage container at a middle school in Greenburg, Pennsylvania. She had been bound, beaten and stabbed repeatedly. Police have charged three men ...

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has announced that 93,277 workplace discrimination charges were filed during Fiscal Year (FY) 2009, the second highest level ever. Of these, 21,451 were cases involving disability discriminat ...

In April, sixteen-year-old Oscar Guzman was outside his family's restaurant when two officers approached him. He couldn't answer their questions, became frightened and fled inside. Ignoring Oscar's family's explanation that he couldn't understand ...

A bill has been introduced in the US Senate to remove the terms "mental retardation" and "mentally retarded" from federal law. They would be replaced with "intellectual disability" and "individual with an intellectual disability."
The prop ...

In the state's House Judiciary Committee both opponents and supporters voted 14-3 against the bill that would let terminally ill patients over age 18 obtain lethal prescriptions.
Those in favour of assisted suicide did not support the bill ...

After telling his son he loved him, a father in Philadelphia shot and killed the boy and then took his own life.
Fabian Duque, 17 years old, was autistic and used a wheelchair. Luis Carrasquillo, a family friend, said "...everyone on the ...

The House of Representatives voted on October 7th to expand the definition of violent federal hate crimes to those committed because of a victim's sexual orientation, gender or disability.This would add to the current federal law that covers crime ...

Amassive (434 page) authoritative report from the National Council on Disability has found that disabled people "...bear a disproportionate burden of poor health compared with the general population ..."
The report, which contains over 40 ...

The first national crime survey of crime against disabled people has been produced by the US Justice Department.
The figures relate to 2007 and are age adjusted.
Among the report's findings are the following:
Disable ...

A special education teacher who was found to have abused her students will not lose her job in Sarasota County, Florida.
Diana O'Neill, arrested on charges of child abuse, had subsequently been acquitted in court.Nonetheless, the school di ...

More than 40,000 disabled students suffered physical punishment, including beatings, in US state schools (2006-07) . This was revealed in "Impairing Education: Corporal Punishment of Students with Disabiliti ...

As he had promised, President Obama is to sign the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) on Friday, July 24, 2009 at the White House. Significantly, this will be the 19th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with D ...

On Friday 24 April, a mother in Mitchigan, USA has been charged with murder of a disabled adoptive girl.The 9-year-old Shylea Myza Thomas, whose body was found in bin bags in a storage unit suffered from "severe, ongoing malnutrition and neglect" ...

About 2000 disabled people and their families turned up on Saturday, 8th March in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. They wanted to show their disapproval at the govenor's budget plans for May. The proposed cuts would endanger many programs that offer supp ...

On 20th January 2009, the man who had became the 44th President of the USA proclaimed an ‘end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recrimination and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics’.
...

Disabled People were explicitly included in the acceptance speech of the new President elect. He stated that America is a place were all things are possible."It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, bl ...